Bras and a mannequin will be presented in a court by lawyers for Raffaele
Sollecito, one of three people accused of the brutal murder of British
student Meredith Kercher in an alleged sex game turned violent.

Meredith Kercher was found dead in a house she shared in Perugia, Italy.Photo: PA

By Nick Squires, in Rome

12:21PM BST 24 Oct 2008

The unusual props will be used by lawyers to counter prosecution evidence that traces of DNA belonging to IT graduate Sollecito, 24, were found on Miss Kercher’s bra strap when her body was discovered in the Umbrian hill town of Perugia last November.

They will attempt to demonstrate how Mr Sollecito could have come into contact with the bra despite having nothing to do with Miss Kercher’s murder in the house she shared with Mr Sollecito’s girlfriend, American student Amanda ‘Foxy’ Knox.

Prosecutors allege that during a drug-fuelled sex game, Mr Sollecito held Miss Kercher down while Miss Knox, 21, threatened her and then slashed her throat with a knife as the third accused, drifter Rudy Guede, 24, tried to rape her.

Mr Guede claims he was in the bathroom of the shared house on the night of the killing and came out to find a man resembling Mr Sollecito fleeing, leaving behind a semi-naked Miss Kercher dying from knife wounds to her throat.

Entering the court house in Perugia, Mr Sollecito’s lawyers said their defence would rely on hard facts.

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“It will be an address where there won’t just be words, but facts,” said a member of his defence team, Giulia Bongiorno.

A colleague, Luca Maori, said: “We’ll be bringing absolutely new elements to the case to demonstrate the absence of any involvement by Raffaele.”

Mr Sollecito’s father, Francesco, a doctor from Bari in southern Italy, told reporters: “My son had nothing to do with the death of Meredith Kercher and therefore is hopeful about the future.”

Judge Paolo Micheli is expected to decide on Tuesday whether there is enough evidence to send Mr Sollecito and Miss Knox, both of whom have been behind bars for nearly a year, to trial on charges of murder.

Mr Guede is undergoing at his own request a separate, fast-track trial, with a verdict expected also on Tuesday.

All three have denied any involvement in the crime, which shocked Perugia and attracted intense scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic.

Miss Knox has spent her time in jail learning Italian, German and Chinese but allegedly has had to fend off sexual advances from female prisoners, Italian newspapers reported today.

“Once when I was feeling down, I embraced her (a fellow prisoner) and she asked me if I wanted to have sex. But I’m not a lesbian,” Miss Knox reportedly said.

The details of her 11 months in an Umbrian prison emerged from conversations which were bugged by Italian police and leaked to the press.

During exchanges with her parents, chats with other inmates and intercepted emails and letters, Miss Knox said she was confident of being found innocent and that on being released from jail she wanted to visit India, walk the Pacific Crest Trail in the US and get two tattoos.

She spoke seldom of Miss Kercher, noting only on one occasion that the Leeds University student’s family “are suffering more than everyone”.

Nor did she say much about Mr Sollecito. “I don’t want to think of him anymore, it was a relationship lasting two weeks and now months have passed.”

At one point she thought Mr Guede, her other co-accused, was about to shoulder blame for the murder. "I was shouting for joy.”

She had developed a liking for Italian pop singers, including one called Pino Daniele, who sings in Neapolitan dialect which Miss Knox said she found hard to understand because it was so different to mainstream Italian.

She had lost weight by avoiding eating bread and pasta and becoming a vegetarian, Corriere della Serra reported, and now weighed 60kg.

The media frightened her, she said, but she watched little television because it was all “bullshit”, aside from the Italian version of Big Brother.

She wants to write an account of her experience, “even if I have difficulty promoting it.”